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One dead baby, a tragedy.
Two dead babies, a concern.
Fourteen dead babies, I don't care about her. She's fucked. But what fucking hospital has 14 dead babies? Are you saying you cant identify a pattern after 4 or 5?
The heads of the hospital should be gutted.
Call that place "The dead baby hospital" because wtf.
Multiple doctors came forward to say that their concerns were ahot down by hospital administrators. They cared more about a bad mark on their record than a someone harming newborns under their watch.
Administrators should be gutted in a public square. And let's not stop with these ones.
Are administrators actually going to face any punishment?
The senior nurse who was in charge of her was suspended the other day. No idea if any others will face consequences.
She worked in neo natal. That is already "at risk" births. Premature. Addicts. All sorts of things that are risky to begin with. I'm not justifying anything she or the administration did. However it is to be expected at times in those units. Sounds heartless but my family was in those departments for many years.
Kill a bunch of babies? Jail forever.
Ignore someone killing babies to keep your £250,000 a year job safe? That's just good neoliberaling.
@Potatos_are_not_friends @Lanky_Pomegranate530
She murdered 7 babies and attempted to murder 6 others.
Please read the article instead of just the headline.
That's still ridiculous!
I know, how do you manage to “attempt” to kill an infant? They aren’t exactly known for being durable.
She alternated between giving them insulin, injecting air into their bloodstream, and overfeeding them. The babies that recovered most likely did so either because they weren't in bad shape to begin with, or because they coded while a competent doctor or nurse was on call and able to stabilize them, or because of luck. One of the babies she attempted to kill survived, but has severe cerebral palsy and requires a feeding tube. There's no definitive way to say that the nurse's attempts on her life caused her condition, as she was already a preemie and at risk for multiple complications, but I'd say the lack of durability definitely led to at least some lasting damage for some of the babies that recovered.
Oh okay it's fine then.
It's weird to me the level of deranged guilt her diary entries show.
We are responsible for our actions. I just wonder wtf was going on in her head that allowed her to keep doing it. She hated herself for it. Like a lot.
That's the sort of evil I understand and can cope with. There is something wrong with her we don't have the capacity to understand. Some chemical imbalance or growth pushing on her brain in a certain area.
It's the people with nothing wrong with them but allow evil to happen like the hospital administrators that gets me.
This is a mental health issue, do they have free mental health care in the uk?
Yes, but it's difficult to access. You need to want to get the care and actively campaign to be referred.
And that's the "easy" things like anxiety or garden variety depression.
As soon as it gets complicated it's a whole other story.
If she never tried to seek it out, then it doesn't even matter as it appears she didn't give off any "I murder babies" vibes to the extent that the investigation was delayed beyond a reasonable length of time because she was not suspected of such a thing.
Not to mention, if she was diagnosed with something severe, she would probably lose her job if not her entire career. A lot of people avoid seeking help for that reason.
Well, it turns out that you will also lose your job if you are caught murdering babies.
It's so hard, because those families have it so amazingly awful but I can't imagine her being a sane person and doing what she did. She shouldn't be on the street and she needed help a long time ago.
There's a big fucking difference between "i hate myself and want to die" and "might murder a half dozen babies this month".
I think you might be asking a bit much of public mental health care, yeah?
The whole thing is unconscionable imho. Obviously firstly, for her to prey on, and hurt/ murder newborn babies? I can’t wrap my mind around that. At all.
From the admins at the hospital ignoring the worried reports from the physicians who worked on the unit WITH her. The administration went so far as to demand those same physicians go to mediation with her and write out apology letters. Admins accepted her complaints of harassment over the doctor’s concerns that there was a pattern to the infants collapsing. If the DR’s refused to do that they were threatened to lose their jobs!
Then you have the fact that she was in a caregiver profession. Generally the public trusts caregivers/doctors. No one wants to believe that if you have a family member in the hospital, they are at risk of being MURDERED! That’s supposed to be a safe space from the world!
No one will be able to repair the public’s perception of the medical profession if medical professionals kill their patients.
This whole incident is terrifying. Reading the article, it linked to other articles, which I of course followed… that was a eye opening experience. I had no idea that there were multiple occasions that this had happened. Counting babies, adults, and the elderly. I can’t make sense of this.
Honestly the administration should be doing just as much time. Somewhere in their cushy offices, they ran the numbers and decided that the life of multiple infants was worth less than their brand. I wish them all a very long stay in gen pop.
I remember watching a (at least somewhat) factual documentary about another serial killer who murdered elderly people in care. Apparently, even when there are multiple suspicions, even from previous employers, some hospitals refuse to take action. In the documentary it was speculated that this is because it's apparently hard to get enough personnel. So if someone does an otherwise good job on the surface they won't look closer. Hospitals are a business, and management only cares whether or not it's profitable.
That’s scary. I read some articles last night following links after this article. From nurses who like the thrill of “saving lives” (causing patients to code so they can be the “hero”). To doctors killing to get written into their patients’ wills. To one male nurse who killed his elderly patients, by all accounts simply because he hated geriatric women?
The crimes were years ago, but the system needs to be fixed. If a medical professional is suspected of causing harm to their patients, then they should be investigated while being suspended (or removed from direct patient care during the investigation).
If ultimately the accusations are unfounded, then great. However for those times the investigation shows wrong doing. That’s when shit needs to get real. Police need to be called in. Medical/nursing board of licensing should be involved. Otherwise, a hospital should be liable for lawsuits for wrongdoing in my opinion.
Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good.
Ah. I see what you did there.
Ok I know this bitch should die but this judge should do at least three months in a level two for this fit.
Just because yank Judges got no style.
There's a lot of hate here that I can empathise with and I'm trying to not take calls for her to commit suicide or be murdered/ tortured in prison literally. It's difficult to express hate verbally without reference to physical violence that underscores it. There's sentiment here that life in prison isn't enough and I tend to agree, but not in a way I've seen talked about here or anywhere else.
Letby should be imprisoned for life, no question. But that shouldn't stop us asking more questions about what happened here. Do we treat Letby's murders as isolated, unique cases and expect them to never be repeated? Lock her away and continue business as usual? It's possible that things aren't so simple and we need to look into how somebody like Letby got away with so much for so long and maybe also why she began doing something quite so horrific.
Mental illness is an unfortunate reality to come to grips with because we are steadily recognising that it is caused by relationships an affected person has with their environment. That means there is a share of responsibility in all of us and the systems/ institutions we have built to make sure this does not happen again and that we identify it before it's too late.
It's entirely likely that Letby will turn to self harm, or other extreme outcomes of poor mental health. We can't ask anyone to sympathise with her after what she has done, but we can hope to treat mental illness better in the future and offer help to those who need it, before it's too late. And I don't mean too late in the sense of killing people, because that's not what all mentally ill people do.
I hear prison is really fun for child murderers.
Strangely enough there is another baby murdering nurse in UK prison called Beverley Allitt who in 1993 killed children the same way. She's been inside for 30 years and is actually eligible for parole since she hasn't received a whole life order (i.e. to die in prison). Doesn't mean she'll get parole but expect an outcry if she ever does.
And here I thought this was the nurse from the 90s, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverley_Allitt
But, no. This apparently happened in 2015. Creepy how both cases are so similar.
No kidding... How strange they both were UK serial baby killers. And Beverley Allitt was convicted before her 25 birthday if I looked at it right. She was caught in '91, so she was doing it as a 23-year-old girl...
ETA: they were both mid-twenties when the murders occurred. I don't know why I got hung up on that, it is just shocking to me that they were so young and doing something so deplorable. I just imagine some older deranged woman doing something like that. Either way...unreal.
Tldr/ootl... How and why did she do this?
Apparently she wrote in her private diary stuff like "I am evil for doing this" and "I am a horrible person for doing these things". IMO this points more towards a massive mental health disorder rather than someone purposely doing evil acts to achieve their own selfish desires. It sounds like she had very unwanted intrusive impulses and she was unable to stop herself from acting on them.
Don't get me wrong, her being aware that her acts were wrong doesn't give her a get out of jail pass. The awareness of her drives being wrong means the onus was on her to get help to prevent her from acting on those drives. But IMO it does make clear that there was no motive, it was likely caused by a compulsion mental illness. This is all IMO though.
According to this article they never conclusively determined what her motive was. There were theories that it my have been Munchausen's by proxy or simple sadism in response to seeing the families grieve, but nothing was ever proven. As for her methods, this article details them and I'll leave you to read up on that, not going to detail it here. Suffice it to say, this woman deserves to never see the light of day again.
She used her position as a nurse to intentionally kill newborns.
Before reading, I initially thought that maybe there was a reason like she could have mental health issues or that she could be just someone extremely incompetent at her job... But the more you read, the more this makes me want to vomit... It's truly sickening!
She's essentially a serial killer so I was looking into her past. Her parents were extremely over bearing, clingy and guilt trippers who were always smothering her, so I'm sure that contributed, but there's gotta be more in her past that led her to this.